%configure used to copy config.sub and config.guess files from /usr/share/libtool/config into the top source directory. That's not a good idea when you try to build a newer libtooll to update those files... I haven't checked for a while if %configure still does that, though.

That behaviour has been removed at Fedora 10 already. Now I've to copy
these files myself into buildroot to get old software rebuilding. So
%configure should work with Fedora >= 10 for you again. Maybe we just
can test it in a scratch build?

Hmm, according to the build logs %configure is just a macro that exports compiler flags and calls ./configure with a bunch of arguments that set destinations, for example on rawhide i586 the arguments are
./configure --build=i386-redhat-linux-gnu --host=i386-redhat-linux-gnu --target=i586-redhat-linux-gnu --program-prefix= --prefix=/usr --exec-prefix=/usr --bindir=/usr/bin --sbindir=/usr/sbin --sysconfdir=/etc --datadir=/usr/share --includedir=/usr/include --libdir=/usr/lib --libexecdir=/usr/libexec --localstatedir=/var --sharedstatedir=/var/lib --mandir=/usr/share/man --infodir=/usr/share/inf

(In reply to comment #6)
> Check out older redhat-rpm-config packages' macros file, e.g. in F8, to see the
> old definition where it copied files as Karsten says.
OK, but that's no problem anymore since rawhide is F12 :)
> You can use "rpm --eval %configure", btw.
Duh, true.